On September 7, 2006 I drove to Guglhupf Bakery and Café in Durham for lunch with the new director of Duke Performances, Aaron Greenwald. We had never met. Little did we know how much the work of Duke Performances and the Jazz Loft Project and the Center for Documentary Studies would come to overlap. This week, more than three and a half years later, the latest product of the collaboration, a beautiful film called IN MY MIND by CDS filmmakers Gary Hawkins and Emily LaDue, will be unveiled in Durham at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (see poster by CDS designer Bonnie Campbell below). It is an outcome of JLP that we never could have expected, or produced ourselves, and therefore it feels like a unique and meaningful milestone for everyone involved. Here’s a look back at the meandering path:
As Aaron and I munched sandwiches at Guglhupf that day, he described his ambitions to present a series of concerts in the fall of 2007 to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Thelonious Monk’s birth in Rocky Mount, N.C. about ninety miles from Durham. His vision was that Duke Performances could do more to connect with the fertile region from which Duke University’s vast endowment had grown, literally; the Duke family fortune originated in the tobacco fields. Aaron knew that I had studied Monk as part of the JLP. He didn’t know that I grew up in “little” Washington in North Carolina’s coastal plains and I felt a kinship with Monk, valid or not, based on our shared soil (not just the birth home but the Monk ancestral home in nearby Newton Grove) and Monk’s heavy southern accent which can be heard clearly on Smith’s tapes. Over the following fourteen months my Jazz Loft colleagues Dan Partridge, Sarah Moye, and I worked with Aaron and his staff on a near daily basis.
In September and October of 2007 Duke Performances presented Following Monk, a stunning series of eighteen events including the likes of the Kronos Quartet, Jason Moran, Charles Tolliver, Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, Randy Weston, Kenny Barron, Andy Bey, Henry Butler, Jessica Williams, Jerry Gonzales, Johnny Griffin, Barry Harris, Paul Jeffrey, Alonzo King’s LINES ballet, writers Stanley Crouch and Robin D.G. Kelley, and more. CDS and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz were co-sponsors of the series. A number of Monk’s relatives from eastern North Carolina attended the shows.
During Following Monk CDS radio documentarian John Biewen created an NPR segment which was aired nationally on Monk’s birthday, “Digging Up Thelonious Monk’s Southern Roots,” featuring Monk’s son, T.S. Monk. I wrote a cover story for the Oxford American’s annual music issue, “Is this Home?” concerning Monk’s return to North Carolina in May of 1970 to play for two weeks at Raleigh’s legendary Frog & Nightgown club. Following Monk was covered by all the mainstream and alternative media outlets in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. Monk was in the air. It felt like a significant achievement.
The cornerstones of Following Monk were two shows paying homage to Monk’s historic Town Hall concert from February 27, 1959, the first time Monk had performed his music with a big band. The tentet arrangements were conceived and rehearsed by Monk and Hall Overton on the fourth floor of 821 Sixth Avenue, a diligent process that was documented by W. Eugene Smith in photographs and tapes. In one Following Monk show trumpeter Charles Tolliver led his tentet through a powerful, near note-for-note re-performance of Monk’s original concert. In the second, Jason Moran and his Big Bandwagon, an octet, created a seminal 75-minute piece called IN MY MIND. The mixed media piece went back-and-forth in time, making explicit use of Smith’s photographs and tapes from Monk’s rehearsals, while evoking the Monk family’s Newton Grove homeland and blending elements of Jason’s own autobiography.
Moran’s connection to Jazz Loft in the first place was serendipity. Let me backtrack. In March of 2005 New York Times writer Ben Ratliff visited CDS for three days researching the first major story on the JLP. Then, in the fall of 2006, not long after Aaron and I had lunch at Guglhupf, Ratliff interviewed Jason Moran on-stage at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jason talked a lot about Monk and he mentioned a gig in San Francisco for SFJAZZ in mid-2007 in which he would lead a tentet, with T.S. Monk on drums, performing new, yet-to-be-written transcriptions of Monk’s original Town Hall arrangements. After the program Ratliff asked Jason, have you ever heard about the Jazz Loft Project and Eugene Smith’s documentation of Monk’s Town Hall rehearsals? Jason answered no, but left intrigued. I got my first email inquiry from him in November 2006. Over the next eleven months Jason visited CDS and Duke many times. We made a pilgrimage to Newton Grove with Jason’s videographer, visiting Monk’s Crossroads and the Monk Plantation, the grave of Monk’s father’s brother, John Jack Monk, who never left Newton Grove and lived to be 102 (outliving his nephew Thelonious) and we ate barbecue at Eddie’s Cafe. Jason also sent the expert transcriber David Weiss to CDS for several painstaking days in our offices transcribing Monk’s Town Hall rehearsals from Smith’s tapes into charts for Jason’s band to play. The resulting IN MY MIND premiered in October 2007 as part of Following Monk. It was co-commissioned by partners Aaron lined up, SFJazz, Chicago Symphony Center, and the Washington (D.C.) Performing Arts Society and it traveled to those cities.
The success of Following Monk led Duke’s President Richard Brodhead and Provost Peter Lange to boldly support a risky new project in New York City February 26-27, 2009, a presentation of Tolliver’s tentet concert and Moran’s IN MY MIND at Town Hall to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Monk’s original concert in that space. By this time, Lauren Hart had joined me and Dan Partridge on JLP staff and we did everything we could to help Aaron and his staff. At times it felt perilous, like a potential disaster, mostly for reasons out of our control. I think Aaron felt like his job could be on the line. People told us we were naive not to have somebody like Denzel Washington or Clint Eastwood introduce the concerts. Nobody would show up without the celebrities. (Three months before our Town Hall shows I gave pre-concert talks before three nights of Monk shows at Jazz at Lincoln Center and TV stars Soledad O’Brien and Courtney B. Vance introduced and narrated the three concerts). But Aaron resisted. With Duke’s support, he put the music on a pedestal and the ticket prices were held at relative low levels. The Hall was about two-third’s full both nights and it felt raw and energized, not a refined culture-night-out. Tolliver’s concert was broadcast live by WNYC: New York Public Radio, our collaborator on the Jazz Loft Project Radio Series, and I joined their “Evening Music” host Terrance McKnight in the broadcast booth. More than thirty Monk relatives chartered a bus from the New Haven, CT area to Town Hall for IN MY MIND. The concerts were received well by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times twice here and here, Slate.com, and New York magazine, among others. Some of the informal feedback from pros and purists in attendance heartened us the most.
With support from CDS director Tom Rankin and associate directors Greg Britz and Lynn McKnight, CDS film director Gary Hawkins and producer Emily LaDue videotaped the Town Hall performance of IN MY MIND with seven cameras operated by students from their advanced video course along with cinematographer Steve Milligan. After a year of intensive editing by Hawkins and LaDue, the highly anticipated results will be unveiled at the Full Frame Documentary Film festival later this week, on Friday night at 10:30pm. We’ve seen early cuts. Gary and Emily have created a vital piece of work, weaving poignant interviews with Jason and his band into the concert footage. It achieves a difficult double entendre: It pays homage to history while rendering fresh, new expressions, making it a tremendous example of documentary art. I don’t know of anything like it among jazz films of recent times. It transcends jazz and will be engaging to people who know little about jazz. Gary and Jason Moran will do Q&A after the screening.
IN MY MIND will have its New York premier at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center on April 19. Jason and Gary will do Q&A after this screening, too.
Looking back over the twelve year history of the Jazz Loft Project (eight years full-time), IN MY MIND is an outcome with so many integral roles. That kind of teamwork makes it all the more meaningful.
-Sam Stephenson
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